Contrary to common belief, nowhere does The United States Constitution state that there must be a separation of church and state. There is only one brief statement in the First Amendment that addresses the relationship between the federal government and religion, which says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
How has this misconception that The Constitution mandates a separation of church and state become so prevalent as to so radically change the country and destroy our religious liberty? Charles Spurgeon lamented that he could find ten men who would die for The Bible for every one that would read it. We may have ten people taking office swearing to defend The Constitution for every one that has even read it, much less has the courage to defend it.
Our lawyers took Constitutional Law in law school, and they never once referred to The Constitution itself, but only studied Supreme Court decisions and precedents! So we cannot presume that lawyers, judges, or even justices actually know it.
If the Founders intended to have the so-called separation of church and state, why was one of the first acts of Congress to provide for the publishing of The Bible in America? And why was one of the first acts of Congress when it occupied the new capital building to authorize it to be used for church services? The church that met in the capital building quickly became the largest church in Washington, with the President, most of the members of Congress, and other government employees attending.
Now, when a politician claims to be defending The Constitution, it is likely they are doing something to undermine it. To not know The Constitution better than they do is a most grievous dereliction of duty in regard to their most basic responsibility, and it has brought great damage to the country.
Many books have been written on Supreme Court decisions that violated The Constitution. Some of these violations have been reversed, but many have been built upon with other decisions that became increasingly extreme and damaging to the country, robbing us of our most basic and precious freedoms. We will cover these in future briefs, but this deception and fallacy about the separation of church and state is just one that has been wrongly imposed on the nation, but it may be the most costly.
As the activist judges have been able to get away with this one, they seemed to think they could get away with anything, and since seemed to have almost no regard for the actual Constitution. Perhaps the biggest delusion of all is that those who get elected to public office, or appointed to courts, actually know what they’re doing. The process that has evolved by which people are even nominated to run for office is now so corrupted that the truly competent and honorable people who could do the job well will not get involved in such a perverted process.
The democratic process was always going to be messy and inefficient. As Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all others.” As bad as it can be, it is still better than the alternatives. Even so, we do not have to settle for the level of dysfunction that our U.S. Government has fallen to. So, what can we do?
The cause of almost every crisis of government, and the increasing divisions in our land, are the result of departing from the wisdom found in our Constitution. The answer to these crises is to return to The Constitution. Then we should have a basic test for every law passed or regulation imposed by our government to be sure it complies with The Constitution. This would not be hard to do. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are short and can be read in an hour by the average reader.
Some argue that we should disregard The Constitution, claiming that it is archaic, written for an agrarian people, and it does not fit the modern world we now live in. Just one reading of The Constitution and Bill of Rights will dispel such flawed reasoning. The wisdom in our Constitution is ageless, written from a profound and possibly unmatched brilliant understanding of human nature and what corrupts those in power.
The Founders set up balances of power and firewalls in the government to resist the corrupting potential of power. It contained brilliant cultural relief valves for releasing dangerously high pressure from conflicts on social issues. These allowed for adjustments and change for those who wanted them, without imposing them on those who did not.
Most important of all, The Constitution establishes and protects our freedoms. It limited the centralizing of power in the Federal Government and set up counter-balancing checks in the three branches of it, which had never before been conceived of in a government. However, the form that it has now taken by violating The Constitution would be hard to recognize by the Founders, or anyone who looked at it in the light of The Constitution.
The Federal Government only has legal authority that is specifically given to it in The Constitution. What is not specifically given to it remains the authority of the states and the people. Nowhere does The Constitution give the Federal Government any authority over religious, social, or cultural issues. These were issues that were to be worked out on the state and local level where they impacted people the most and where the people themselves could be more engaged.
If these important social issues had been addressed the way that The Constitution mandated, we would not have nearly the social and cultural discord in the nation today. By not addressing these according to The Constitution, the pressure has built to a point that it now threatens our continued existence as one nation.
The Federal Government has gotten far outside the lane given to it by The Constitution. Every area that it has done this has caused problems that quickly grew into major crises. One of the definitions of a crisis is the point in a disease that it is determined if the patient will live or die. It does not take a prophet to see that our country is now at that point.
We have now violated The Constitution and every serious warning the Founders said the Republic could not survive. America is close to being like a patient that is so sick that the operation required to save us would kill us. This may be true if we tried to fix everything at once. So, how do we do it?
First, we cannot lose hope. We may be beyond human remedy, but we serve the God for which nothing is impossible. We can mark almost all of the present distress as beginning at the very time prayer was unconstitutionally removed from our schools. We must demand that the Federal Government obey our First Amendment right to not prohibit the free exercise of religion in America and return to honoring God in our country, as The Constitution provided for.
About 80% of Americans acknowledge belief in God. Activist judges allowed a handful of atheists and agnostics who claimed to be offended by the way we honored God to steal the rights of the overwhelming majority of Americans to freely exercise their religion. While we should seek to respect the rights of all, minorities included, to use the offense of any group to suppress the rights of the rest is tyranny.
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Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.
–Thomas Jefferson
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.
–Thomas Paine, author with the American Founding Fathers of one of the most influential books, Common Sense.
© 2020 by Rick Joyner. All rights reserved.
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